How Killers of the Flower Moon Puts America's First Crime on Trial

Killers of the Flower Moon Isn’t for an Indigenous Audience. It’s for the Wolves

At the premiere of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Osage language consultant Christopher Cote gave an insightful, nuanced red carpet interview. He said that “this film was not made for an Osage audience, it was made for everybody not Osage.” As a movie focused on the murders of Osage people, that sounds concerning. But he continued explaining that, while those who have been oppressed can relate, it’s really there for those who’ve benefited from the oppression. It gives them an opportunity to ask themselves the movie’s hard questions. “How long will you be complacent with racism? How long will you go along with something, and not say something?”

These are the questions our country has worked to bury since its birth. They were never meant for an Indigenous audience. They were meant to be the uncomfortable confrontation awaiting everyone else, especially those showing up to Killers of the Flower Moon eager (subconsciously or not) to see the bloodshed Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro inflict upon Lily Gladstone and those around her. Scorsese knows the audiences for his movies only get bigger when the cruelties of his bad men are front and center—when he leans into his misbegotten reputation as a director of gangster movies. So he’s weaponized his place in pop culture to tell the biggest gangster story of them all, sold in the most palatable way possible for your average American. Here’s how America was stolen, told as a small-town crime epic. It’s a microcosm of our national dynamic, filled with murder, money and A-listers.

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Of course, this is how Scorsese needed to make this movie. He could never make a truly Osage film, no matter how closely he worked with the Osage Nation. He could only make his movie, for his audience, advised by Osage experts to get the details right. Similarly, it took Lakota filmmakers (like director Jesse Short Bull and writer Layli Long Soldier) to create this year’s documentary Lakota Nation vs. United States. Both movies attack colonization using the language of true-crime; one focuses on the truth, the other on the crime.

If the questions Cote identifies are pointed, specifically leveled at audiences looking to luridly enjoy the violent eradication of a people, broader ones link Killers of the Flower Moon with Lakota Nation vs. United States. How were our histories written? Perhaps more importantly, what assumptions about our history have been assembled into the living reality of our pop culture? Both movies recognize that more people turn to comic books than textbooks; that our racist cultural artifacts construct our identities and politics even more than our cherry-picked, whitewashed educations.

Redressing the falsehoods still pervading our nonfiction, Lakota Nation vs. United States “uses a blunt bricolage of children’s cartoons, westerns (the most American movie genre) and national journalism, captured in 1890s headlines and 1980s soundbites,” as I wrote in my review.

Reimagining the real, revising not just the western genre but the Western mentality, Killers of the Flower Moon adapts David Grann’s research into a tragedy shaken by its own storytelling structure. The newly formed FBI may have solved these specific murders, perpetrated by white vultures, but what’re a few convictions when there’s blood on all the Hands Across America?

Both movies address specific instances of genocide in the language of their form. One looks like an academic poem, fiery and beautiful. One looks like a bloody blockbuster, righteous and subversive. One uses the vocabulary of resistance. One speaks the venomous words of settlers. Approached from opposite perspectives, these two movies desperately insist on self-reflection. The real question is, between them, can America finally grasp its original sin?

If you’re showing up to the arthouse in order to be on Lakota Nation vs. United States’ jury, you might be ready for its more direct approach. If you’re one of the people buying a ticket to the new Scorsese movie on a Friday night…well, the odds are simply better that his self-conscious, smuggled, bomb-under-the-seats approach will be more effective. The good news is that, as a culture, we’re increasingly primed for both movies, and the conversation they have with one another.

A couple of years ago, when HBO’s Watchmen reminded some of us and taught others about the Tulsa Race Massacre, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie remarked that “the level of reader familiarity with the country’s history of racial pogroms was much lower even 8 or 9 years ago.” This, at least when it comes to Black Wall Street, is thanks to “a new generation of history-informed Black journalists + the work of activists and historians,” which filters down to the public. Lakota Nation vs. United States highlights the work of Indigenous voices, tirelessly spearheading everything from the Land Back movement to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests to increase public awareness of their long-suffering reality—the starter fluid for a self-critical piece of pop media like Killers of the Flower Moon.

This may seem like new ground for Scorsese, but it applies what has always been his moralistic M.O.: To turn genre conventions against themselves, to make movies that are sheep in wolves’ clothing.

His gangsters destroy those around them. They lose everything, poisoning our world and themselves. The hard part is that they’re placed in front of us long enough for us to relate. Taxi Driver’s vigilante Travis Bickle is another bloodbath waiting to happen. The Irishman’s hitman Frank Sheeran becomes a lonely ghost, consumed by fear and shame. Goodfellas’ frantic Henry Hill only survives by turning informant. That doesn’t work out so hot for pretty much anyone in The Departed. Casino and The Wolf of Wall Street show how large-scale criminal activities have long been identified as the best practices of capitalism.

Now, alongside them, are William Hale (De Niro) and Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio). William requests that his nephew Ernest, newly back from WWI, do like those around him in Fairfax, Oklahoma, and show him fealty as its “King.” William encourages Ernest to romantically pursue Mollie (Gladstone), an Osage woman whom the would-be tyrant sees as a gateway to more oil money.

This predatory premise was introduced in the first Killers of the Flower Moon trailer. It memorably overlays Ernest’s voiceover reading of “Can you see the wolves in this picture?” with images of white men. They approach us in a teeming, hungry mass, swarming off of a train, which brought them into Osage County like the ships that bore the plague rats. They turn, with stiff collars and stiff drinks, to stare us down in a pitch-black room. The greedy, consumptive villains of this story never needed to hide in the underbrush; they hunt their prey with a handshake and a smile. Even a wedding ring.

“Can you see the wolves in this picture?” is a loaded piece of narration, taken from a montage in which Ernest learns from a book on the Osage. Ernest reads it to inform himself about the locals, bolstering his intentions towards Mollie. Scorsese uses it to inform us, spelling out the intentions of his film.

DiCaprio’s slow, deliberate delivery echoes the text; this is clearly a Dick and Jane-level primer, only given to Ernest after William asks if he can read. Like someone who definitely can’t read, Ernest mumbles and grumbles indignantly that of course he can read. His follow-the-finger elocution confirms our assumption. Ernest is never shown to be the fastest ship in Columbus’ fleet, but symbolizing his competence with this children’s book works on two levels.

The first reminds us that you don’t have to be the brightest person in the room to be an instrument of evil. You just have to be weak, and resentful. The news is filled with this spineless, mundane hate. So is every other character in Killers of the Flower Moon, Ernest (only able to serve as an Army cook, not even a proper soldier) perhaps the bitterest of all.

The second reiterates how easy it is to see the atrocities at hand if you haven’t blinded yourself. The killers are never obscured, as the Blue’s Clues-like question drives home. “Can you see the wolves in this picture?” You can only miss them, and what this means, intentionally.

To combat this need to look away, to equivocate, to avoid complicity at all costs, Killers of the Flower Moon and Lakota Nation vs. United States strike with a similar simplicity.

In my review of the latter, I wrote that it uses plain language and plain images to rewrite assumptions so ingrained in the story of our country as to be invisible. The U.S. perspective isn’t a useful one for the doc to reckon with. As is made clear in the title, it is an occupying force that should remain on trial, and that’s how it’s treated. Its robbery isn’t abstract, but spelled out in broken peace treaties, water rights agreements and settlement protections. The stolen goods are just as tangible, as the Black Hills’ beauty is shown “blooming in bright sunflowers, towering as tough granite crags, persisting around burned-out forts, and running alongside horses and deer.”

Killers of the Flower Moon is just as quick to make its case clear. The “King” spells out his plan in no uncertain terms: Grab the oil rights by a combination of marriage and murder, the “legal” and illegal operating with a synergy only possible if both designations were designed with the winners and losers already in mind. Scorsese tells us that this isn’t a whodunnit, but a who-didn’t-do-it. If the plot feels inevitable, that’s the point. In our review of the film, Jason Gorber writes:

The journey, while processional, deals with profound and disturbing truths. The unraveling that takes place may be obvious, yet the underlying betrayal resonates throughout. There’s a bravura closing moment that hopefully won’t be spoiled for you, a very welcome flourish that makes clear the director’s intention in escalating what, in so many ways, is a forgotten part of American history.

I agree that the finale is a showstopper, an intertextual marvel from Scorsese that’s obsessed with the media’s relationship to crime and to the creation of history. It even has a little to say about true-crime podcasts, believe it or not. But I disagree that it is doing anything with “a forgotten part of American history.” Indigenous history, like Indigenous people, wasn’t forgotten. It was purged.

Those running their mouths throughout Killers of the Flower Moon, those whose perspective we share most often, reflect the vastness that’s been fed into the memory hole. When Ernest and William share their first conversation, William advises his nephew not to gab around people who tend to think before they speak. He calls this kind of thoughtless blather “blackbird talk,” something he claims he picked up from the Osage. It’s a reference that conveys how close William has gotten to the Osage Nation, and it perks our ears up to who’s flapping their gums and whose words have been erased.

When Ernest finally perseveres his mopey hangdog self into a dinner invitation at Mollie’s, we get an elegant example of this. Ernest, hardly reticent with his clown frown, can’t help but jabber. Mollie hushes him up during a storm. Listen to the noise, you might just learn something. This moment gets an evil twin late in the film, where silence again means everything. Gladstone’s performance is a vortex, even without half as many lines as the white men conspiring around her. Her watchful eyes turn from softly amused to rightfully paranoid as Mollie constantly faces new levels of hellish personal grief. As she regards the fools and barbarians around her, her quiet allows them to hang themselves—even her ostensibly loving, self-deceiving husband. Silence and bluster are key elements of Killers of the Flower Moon, another thematic thump on the head emphasizing that the people who get to tell these stories haven’t changed in a century. But what has is how the stories are told, and how we’re invited to receive them.

Will we continue to be complacent when Indigenous people are victims of genocide? Are our established narratives the only truth we can ever know? Can we change our stories, and then our ways?

These are the questions our country has worked to bury since its birth. They were never meant for an Indigenous audience to answer. They were meant for the wolves.

Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.

For all the latest movie news, reviews, lists and features, follow @PasteMovies.

Killers of the Flower Moon Isn’t for an Indigenous Audience. It’s for the Wolves